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The next flagship smartphone from Samsung will reportedly be offered in two versions, a metal-clad premium edition and a cheaper model sporting a plastic case. Sound familiar? It probably does as Apple’s iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C offerings were introduced and sold in a similar fashion.

The news comes just one week after Samsung mobile executive Lee Young Hee said that the company would be going “back to the basics” when it comes to industrial design of their device in an effort to excited customers that Samsung believes were disappointed with the similarities between the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4. The information trickled down from the normally reliable Samsung watchers, SamMobile.

If the information turns out to be true, the move would mirror Apple’s decision to drop its longstanding practice of discounting the previous year’s model in favor of a new, bifurcated lineup. With the introduction of the iPhone 5S, Apple discontinued the iPhone 5 in favor of an all-new iPhone 5C featuring a polycarbonate shell in a variety of colors.
Samsung seems to also be considering adding biometric authentication capabilities to the handset in order to help counter Apple’s popular TouchID feature. Lee mentioned that “many people are fanatical about iris recognition technology” and that Samsung was “studying the possibility” of including it in the Galaxy S5.

As far as the pricing goes, the premium version is expected to retail for €800 ($1,093) while the plastic-backed variant should fetch €650 ($889) when the devices are unveiled this spring, In comparison, Apple’s iPhone 5S starts at €699 ($955) for a model with 16 gigabytes of memory and the iPhone 5c comes in at €599 ($819) for the same configuration.

We’ll have to see what move Samsung makes and how it compares to Apple’s offerings.

I think this is less about copying Apple and more about fending off any competition from other Android manufacturers. The HTC One received a lot of critical praise and sold very well (even though not as well as the S4.) The Galaxy line has flourished against the iPhone which has always had better materials. When looking at potential competitors and the fact that many are using materials other than plastic, Samsung has to step up it's game. They know they can't kill Apple, but they do need to make sure they maintain dominance of the Android ecosystem.

Still though Samsung will lead on android end, whether its plastic or not. they will continue to recycle components from their flagship into their phablet and attempt to build new driver code for components for the same hardware in each and attempt to offer up new features, but still produce crappy quality if not depleting the hardware even more by some of the changes made in the coding that will then be backported by developers(root users as well) to get it back to sub par usage. just my 2 cents....

I like how they used the term mirroring instead of "copy" lol. S4 was nothing more than a camera and video upgrade mainly, plus stretch out the screen in the same S3 frame. Then of course the new useless software features. Then even for the new stuff being released today, can't believe there still running the same old snapdragon CPU lol. Come on that's like 2 yrs old now!